Author's Final Work Sets New Standard

October 09, 1994|By KEITH F. MCLOUGHLAND Book Reviewer

This magnificent new book is a history - its author calls it "a guidebook of time travelers" - of the "long" 16th century, the period from roughly 1450 to 1620, in Europe. It takes as its central theme the fact that those 170 years "witnessed the most concentrated wave of intellectual and creative energy that had yet passed over the continent."

It is the final work of a British scholar (he suffered a crippling stroke just one month after turning the manuscript over to his publisher) generally regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on the Renaissance.

After acknowledging his debt to Jacob Burckhardt, whose seminal work, "The Civilization of The Renaissance in Italy," appeared in 1860, Sir John Hale turns to the first of his broad subjects: the "idea" of Europe which took shape during this age. Here was the moment when the deeply rooted notion of "Christendom" began to fall apart, when "the word Europe first became part of common linguistic usage and ... the continent itself was given a securely map-based frame of reference."

From this new identity came new energy - in government, in economics, in the arts, and so on.

But, Hale argues, there was also a counter-tendency at work: the idea of nation was beginning to jell as well. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and the rest each dug their well of stereotypes and prejudice from which they have all drawn and suffered ever since. As a consequence, the Renaissance was an age of tension, of sophisticated diplomacy, of new creeds, of war, of competition for New World lands (we, after all, on this side of the Atlantic, are products of this era too).

"The genocidal conflicts in the New World," Hale writes, "and the mounting terror in the Old of larger armies and of firearms brought to birth a novel concept, an enforceable international law, designed to restrain political violence, based on inherent `natural' rights to life and property and on respect for the customary usages of mankind as a whole."

When most of us think of the Renaissance, we think of its extraordinary creators - Leonardo, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Durer, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Erasmus, Montaigne, Rabelais, Cervantes, Galileo, Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin and the rest. Hale treats them all (along with countless lesser lights) in this richly illustrated volume, as he does the powerful monarchs - Henry VIII, Philip II, Elizabeth I, Francis I - whose actions also shaped the age.

It must be said that Sir John's splendid book is complex; it assumes a certain level of knowledge (especially of chronology) not all readers will bring to it. Then, too, unfortunately, it contains some factual errors - errors, no doubt, the author would have caught had he been able to see his book through from manuscript to publication.

Still, it is a superb achievement - lively, thought-provoking, informative and, ultimately, celebratory. It brings to vivid life an epoch in human history which had a profound impact on the modern world. And, it may turn out to be as influential in its way as Jacob Burckhardt's book has been for the last 130 years.